4/22/2008 @ 3:15PM

Appraising The 20th Century

For three decades, Tony Judt has brought his elegant and formidable mind to bear on the 20th century. Now, with some slight distance, he is prepared to tell us what lessons we’ve already forgotten and how they’ll shape the future. For Reappraisals, we must be profoundly grateful.

Here in one volume is assembled perhaps the greatest single collection of thinking on the political, diplomatic, social and cultural history of the past century. While I have, of course, followed much of Judt’s research and writing in The New York Review of Books and The New Republic (until his unceremonious banishment from those pages after eloquently arguing for a one-state solution in Israel and Palestine), it is stunning to see his efforts all assembled in these pages. Here, truly, is the weltanschauung of Judt who, when he is not engaged in writing, serves as director of New York University’s Remarque Institute and the amanuensis of a new generation of scholars and thinkers, whose sensibilities he is shaping and skills he is building in his image.

Judt neatly sums up all the joys in store for us in this compendium: “The essays in this book were written over a span of 12 years, between 1994 and 2006. They cover quite a broad swath of subject matter–from French Marxists to American foreign policy, from the economics of globalization to the memory of evil–and they range in geography from Belgium to Israel. But they have two dominant concerns: The first is the role of ideas and the responsibility of intellectuals … My second concern is with the place of recent history in an age of forgetting: the difficulty we seem to experience in making sense of the turbulent century that has just ended and in learning from it.”

These 24 pieces present a century of violence and tumult, of slavery and a desperate search for freedom, of an ever-more accelerating shift in power and prejudice, the death of old empires and the emergence of new ones. This is seen, first through the eyes of many of the greatest, and at time all but forgotten intellectual figures of that century–from Albert Camus through Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt and Arthur Koestler to Leszek Kolakowski. Many of these figures are all but forgotten–as are the ideologies they chronicle, particularly Marxism. Indeed, Judt’s landmark appraisal of Kolakowski, perhaps the greatest single chronicler of that discredited and now all but forgotten ideology, sent me scurrying to my bookshelf to examine again his monumental three volumes on The Founders, The Golden Age, and The Breakdown. It is a bit stunning to imagine, as Judt points out so astutely, that today you must be 35 years old if you are to “have any adult memory of a Communist regime.”

As a journalist, I was present for many of the decades and events that now come under Judt’s scrutiny. I was monitored, followed, even assaulted by the secret policy of Czechoslovakia’s Gustav Husak, Rumania’s Nicolae Ceausescu and Poland’s Edward Gierek (pretty much in that order). I experienced first-hand the efforts of France’s socialist president, Francois Mitterrand, to dismantle many of the state-controlled enterprises he’d inherited from his Gaullist predecessors. I watched with shock and awe as the Wall dividing East and West came down–physically in Berlin, metaphorically along the entire fault line that Winston Churchill had baptized “the Iron Curtain.”

What is stunning in Reappraisals is to see a historian of these and earlier decades place it all in perspective–a vast and grand mosaic of the human spirit that is at once uplifting and profoundly instructive for the world we live in and the new century which is beginning, alas, not so differently from the previous one.

Again, in the 21st century we have wars–a global War on Terror instead of a First World War. We have terrorists who are as desperately motivated by their religion as were their counterparts at the start of the last century–Bolsheviks who worshiped a different god, Karl Marx. Later, we had, of course, Basques, Malays, the Japanese Red Army, Germany’s Rote Armee Fraktion and Baader-Meinhoff Gang, Italy’s Red Brigade. Judt observes that “there is nothing new about terrorism and it is hard to know what to make of a historian who can claim that terrorism is a ‘post-Cold War phenomenon.’” He is hardest on those such as John Lewis Gaddis, who toss off in a cavalier fashion so many ill-conceived generalities.

It’s hardly surprising that Judt has had some detractors through the years. He is hard on many who are considered in some quarters to be heroes, or victims for that matter, mincing no words. “The

Jewish state today is widely regarded as a–the–leading threat to world peace,” he writes. “And it has forfeited the moral high ground forever.” Of Britain’s Tony Blair: “He is the inauthentic leader of an

inauthentic land.”

If there is one flaw, it is the Euro-centric nature of these essays. There is only the most passing reference to Asia, which just began to come of age, it is true, as the 20th century morphed into the 21st, but where many of the great ideologies that impelled the historical currents of the past hundred years also played out, at times even more vividly or perniciously. In his essay “The Good Society: Europe vs. America,” Judt points out that “the real challenge is preventing war, making peace–and keeping it. And this is something at which Europe is going to be increasingly adept.” But also increasingly irrelevant? After all, the real power in the world is shifting to Asia.

The challenge for Pax 21st is very likely to be India vs. China–and the chances of an Asian Union that will unite that region as the E.U. unites Europe. It would be interesting to hear a social and political commentator as astute as Judt on such issues.

Above all, Judt seems to worry ceaselessly about the absence of moral authority in today’s world, quoting Eric Hobsbawm as pleading, “Social injustice still needs to be denounced and fought. The world will not get better on its own.”

But Reappraisals contains some hope: “After war, the second characteristic of the 20th century was the rise and subsequent fall of the state … ” he writes. So the 21st century may indeed be shaped by the emergence of the micro-state as the new and most dynamic form of national organization, leaving Judt with some slight hope that society can be organized fairly and happily. Not convincing him, of course. Just leaving him with a bit of faith.